Carty: It's time for Rodriguez to apologize and pay up

When the University of Michigan began looking for a new football coach in November, it's safe to say a man the general public ranks with coaching bad boy Nick Saban wouldn't have been high on its list.

Yet comparisons between the carpetbagging Alabama coach and new Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez have been pretty common on talk radio and the Internet over the past few days.

Let's say this up front: Rodriguez is not Saban.

He did not insist again and again that he'd never take the Michigan job, then skulk out of town when millions were put on the table, as Saban did with Alabama when he was coaching the Miami Dolphins. Rodriguez hasn't bolted three straight jobs after short stints, in each case leaving when someone waved more money at him.

That's not to say Rodriguez doesn't deserve some grief.

His damaged reputation is a self-inflicted wound.

From just about the moment it became public that the then-West Virginia coach was considering coming to Michigan, Rodriguez has made decisions that make him look like a coldly calculating mercenary with little concern for the fans and players he's left behind.

It was Rodriguez who failed to ever talk to the West Virginia media - and by extension, the fans who loved him - in any meaningful way about his interview with Michigan and his decision to leave.

Finally, it was Rodriguez who - in his introductory press conference in Ann Arbor - made it clear he'd hired lawyers to try and reduce or void the $4 million buyout he was contractually obligated to pay West Virginia if he left for another job.

In a few short weeks, Michigan has gone from a football program seemingly above question on the ethical front to national poster boy for me-first college football coaches.

If you doubt that, here's what a national columnist for The Associated Press wrote Wednesday:

"Missing files aside, the whole Rodriguez mess is a classic case study about all that is wrong in college football these days, where players get by on room and board while the coaches who lead them become multimillionaires."

You wonder what Bo Schembechler, legendary for always putting character first at Michigan, would say if he were alive.

You know he'd say something.

You know he wouldn't be happy.

Without Bo, it's long past time for somebody else at Michigan to step up and tell Rodriguez he has to do more than let his agent insist West Virginia probably has copies of any missing documents.

The first - and best - action the new coach could take is calling a press conference to announce he's paying West Virginia the $4 million buyout that was in the contract he signed.

It's the right thing to do.

You signed the contract. Live with it.

Yes, maybe you could pay some lawyers to weasel out of part of it, but Rodriguez needs to be about 100 miles from anything that involves weaseling right now.

He should pay the buyout, publicly admit he made some mistakes in the last month or so, apologize to West Virginia and its fans, and promise that the whole experience will cause him to be above question on these matters in the future.

Until both are forthcoming, the odds are pretty good that Rodriguez's public fight with the entire state of West Virginia is going to get uglier before it gets better, dragging Michigan and its football program further into the mud in the process.

Read more from Jim Carty at blog.mlive.com/jim_carty. He can be reached at 734-994-6815 or jcarty@annarbornews.com.